On Fri, 10 Aug 2012, maheen butt wrote:
> Hi,
> I came to know from Xen-ARM wiki and other related pages that ARM Â port is based onÂ
> xen-unstable and it can boot a Linux 3.0 based virtual machine (dom 0). for reference
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/29/265
>
> As Xen-ARM can boot Linux 3.0, it means that this hypervisor is usingÂ
> paravirt_ops infrastructure of kernel. I want to know that did you explicitlyÂ
> add paravirt_ops support in kernel for ARM?
The xen-unstable based ARM port uses the new virtualization extensions
introduced recently by ARM. Therefore it requires a Cortex-A15 processor
or newer in order to work. On the other hand no paravirt_ops support is
necessary in the kernel, as we are using nested paging in hardware.
> As far as I know paravirt_ops is an infrastructure given by Linux kernel to supportÂ
> hypervisor. and http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps tells that
> at present paravirt_ops is available for x86_32, x86_64 and ia64 architectures.
> If this the case that you have add support of paravirt_ops in Linux kernel for ARM
> architecture then what is the level of complexity for adding this kind of support?
The level of complexity is non-trivial, fortunately we managed to avoid
it.
> Hi,
> I came to know from Xen-ARM wiki and other related pages that ARM Â port is based onÂ
> xen-unstable and it can boot a Linux 3.0 based virtual machine (dom 0). for reference
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/29/265
>
> As Xen-ARM can boot Linux 3.0, it means that this hypervisor is usingÂ
> paravirt_ops infrastructure of kernel. I want to know that did you explicitlyÂ
> add paravirt_ops support in kernel for ARM?
The xen-unstable based ARM port uses the new virtualization extensions
introduced recently by ARM. Therefore it requires a Cortex-A15 processor
or newer in order to work. On the other hand no paravirt_ops support is
necessary in the kernel, as we are using nested paging in hardware.
> As far as I know paravirt_ops is an infrastructure given by Linux kernel to supportÂ
> hypervisor. and http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps tells that
> at present paravirt_ops is available for x86_32, x86_64 and ia64 architectures.
> If this the case that you have add support of paravirt_ops in Linux kernel for ARM
> architecture then what is the level of complexity for adding this kind of support?
The level of complexity is non-trivial, fortunately we managed to avoid
it.